Slashdot Mirror
TrollTech to IPO?
burninginside writes "Yahoo is reporting that Trolltech, the world's biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices, may be heading public. 'Sources close to the company' said the move may come as soon as 12 months but the official word is still that it 'is not in our immediate plans.'"
Here's a link to another news story with a bit more info: Trolltech
For any of you wondering who Trolltech is and why you would care about them, their biggest claim to fame is that they develop Qt, the GUI used by KDE.
The execs are Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen. While at Microsoft, Christensen brought to market the Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and Smartphone, in addition to Mobile Information Server and Server ActiveSync. Tod Nielsen too held senior management positions such as vice president, Platform Group and vice president, Developer Relations.
As long as Trolltech continues to make a developer kit so that us less financially inclined can just complile and test software on their platform for free, I will be happy.
On this topic, I'm sure KDE has the right to take the current QT version and call it their's if Trolltech go bankrupt or go 12 months without a QT release, and release it under a BSD-style license. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm too lazy to reread the agreement doc)
Some details here
wait I was wrong. I thought you were talking about a clause in the GPL or something that it automatically goes under BSD if there's no development. Wow I never knew that they made that agreement, feel free to mod the above post to oblivion.
KDE Free Qt Foundation:
The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization founded by Trolltech and the KDE e.V. in 1998 with the purpose to secure the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software and in particular for the development of the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
Agreement page 1
2 3 4
The question of course is: what is a new release? Just another version number?
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
ermmm. Qt is already GPL'd.
That bloat example is just plain idiotic.
The 'NORMAL' example is simplistic, and the 'BLOATED' example is contrived. You can demonstrate exactly the same level of bloat and simplicity for that exact operation in any language, object oriented or not.
assuming the 'normal' example is BASIC, which it most looks like, then A and B are numbers - primitives, then the java example is actually
System.out.println(a + b);
Or a C++ example is
cout << (a + b);
Now, lets say that a and b are _not_ primitives, what if they're a complex type of some description.
In C++ the example would remain:
cout << (a + b);
In java, it would most likely be:
System.out.println(a.add(b));
What would it be in BASIC, or C?
most likely it'd be something like -
complex_type_add(a, b);
a_string = complex_type_to_string(a);
printf("%s\n", a_string);
free(a_string);
Object oriented programming adds a _little_ bloat to simplistic cases, but greatly simplifies complex cases.
If you believe that it inherently causes bloat, then you're never planning to move beyond "Hello, World".
and yes, IHBT.
Advanced users are users too!
Only if they also release their software. If you only use the software internally you can be both GPL and closed source.
actually, they do. It's not part of the GPL (obviously) but it is a separate contractual agreement.
p hp
http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
"new release" is defined in the definitions section of the contract and states that such a release must include bug fixes, performance enhancements and new features in line with an actively developed commercial C++ toolkit as gauged by other active libraries in the industry